Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said it was OK
for government agents (without a warrant) to surreptitiously install a
GPS tracking device on a car while it was in the owner's driveway.

The
decision notes
that "the driveway had no gate, no 'No Trespassing' signs, and no
features to prevent someone standing in the street from seeing the
entire driveway. ... Thus, because Pineda-Moreno did not take steps to
exclude passersby from his driveway, he cannot claim a reasonable
expectation of privacy in it..."

Sounds like I should post a sign in my driveway. Maybe one like this,
which says "This area is under video surveillance for the prevention of crimes
by the police". (The ambiguity works better in the German word order.)

I don't think that most people in the United States would agree with the
panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the
door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that
will track the vehicle's every movement and transmit that information to
total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such
clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived
under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu.

The DC Circuit also
ruled on
a GPS case last year. Unlike the Ninth Circuit, they found that the
surveillance violated Fourth Amendment rights.
The issue may well end up in the Supreme Court.

While viewing faces, human participants often demonstrate natural
gaze bias towards the left visual field, that is the right side of
the person's face is often inspected first and for a longer period. ...
Domestic dogs, however, demonstrated left gaze bias only towards human faces,
but not towards macaque or dog faces, nor symmetrical object images.

I'll leave it to others to speculate on whether the right side of a
human face is more expressive than the left. I just want to say that
I like an element of asymmetry in an otherwise symmetrical design.
I like dogs with asymmetric markings. I like the asymmetric
rear window (if not much else) of the
Nissan Cube.
I like the not-quite-symmetric serifs on the T in Garamond
and similar typefaces (see the top of this page).

And I'm amused by how a snake is less symmetric internally than you or I.
Snake kidneys, for example, are staggered to make better
use of the available space.

I don't have a pic of my snake's innards to show you, but these are mine:

I was faced with a dilemma a couple days ago.
The details of the dilemma are irrelevant to the point I have in mind,
which is that I spent a bit of time agonizing over my choice.
As is so often the case, my recent dilemma required choosing between
unpleasant alternatives. But pleasant alternatives can also take a
while to choose from--even if the time passes more enjoyably.

How much time can it take to make a choice?
In practice, a marble will not rest on a knife edge
for long--but there remains a chance, however small,
that it will balance for as long as a minute.

In considering what direction things fall in,
Aristotle
wrote of a man who "though exceedingly hungry and thirsty, and
both equally, yet being equidistant from food and drink, is therefore
bound to stay where he is...".

Computers are designed to not vacillate. A modern CPU makes billions
of decisions every second, with every decision made in a timely manner.

Electricity, however, is not inherently digital. Voltages come in shades
of gray. Where possible, digital logic is designed to ensure that each
voltage representing a bit of data is comfortably above or below
some threshold at the time a decision is to be made.
A voltage will inevitably take on intermediate values as it
rises or falls,
but we can design circuits to pay attention only at regularly-scheduled
moments when we've arranged for it to be steadily high or low. The
timing is similar to how the shutter in a movie projector is synchronized
with the mechanism that holds each frame still while it is projected.

But if a logic circuit tries to evaluate signals that are not arriving on
a predictable schedule, all bets are off. It can take a while to
make a decision. This is true no matter whether you build the
circuit from transistors, relays, or marbles and hinges. Electrical
engineers have techniques for managing the hazard of what they call
metastability,
but it is a tricky business.